Hyper-V & SSD array

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Ellimist

New Member
Jun 16, 2020
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Hi Folks,

I'm looking at upgrading the storage array on my VM server. I run the following Build:

Dual Opteron 6338P
KGPE-D16
SAS2008 PIKE card (I have flashed these to IT mode. This one is currently in RAID mode though)
8x 10k 300GB SAS drives
256GB of DDR 3 1600

What I'm looking to do is replace the SAS drives with some SATA SSD's. I was thinking of using Samsung 860 EVO drives either 500GB or 1TB.

Due to it being PCIe 2 and the PIKE card only being a x4 link I was also thinking about getting a 1015 off ebay to use a x8 slot so I can get full 4GB/s but I couldn't find any good info on if running storage spaces in mirror mode would cause a bottleneck or in IT mode if the card can run at basically full throughput.

I'm wondering what sort of performance people see when using storage spaces in a dual mirror mode using SSD's like this or any gotcha's with taking this approach to get some better performance for the VM's as resource wise the slowest thing in the system is the disk and for the amount of SQL databases I've got with System Center its getting to be a real pain waiting for things when its pretty cheap to go SSD's now.

Any advice or input would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
 

BlueFox

Legendary Member Spam Hunter Extraordinaire
Oct 26, 2015
2,063
1,482
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How many SSDs do you need? Doesn't seem like getting maximum sequential throughput is the main concern, so you could just use the integrated SATA ports.
 

gregsachs

Active Member
Aug 14, 2018
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I was curious, so did a test; I did not stop any activity on the drives.
diskspd -c100m -d30 c: i: e:
c: is 2208 mirror of intel s3510s
i: is 2208 mirror storage space of 2x s3500
e: is 1tb SATA laptop drive.
All are the same HBA, intel RMS25CB80
So the storage space mirror is faster than the 2208 HW raid.
Total IO
thread | bytes | I/Os | MiB/s | I/O per s | file
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0 | 10938482688 | 166908 | 347.72 | 5563.53 | c: (222GiB)
1 | 18506711040 | 282390 | 588.30 | 9412.88 | i: (742GiB)
2 | 4024893440 | 61415 | 127.95 | 2047.14 | e: (931GiB)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
total: 33470087168 | 510713 | 1063.97 | 17023.55

Read IO
thread | bytes | I/Os | MiB/s | I/O per s | file
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0 | 10938482688 | 166908 | 347.72 | 5563.53 | c: (222GiB)
1 | 18506711040 | 282390 | 588.30 | 9412.88 | i: (742GiB)
2 | 4024893440 | 61415 | 127.95 | 2047.14 | e: (931GiB)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
total: 33470087168 | 510713 | 1063.97 | 17023.55
 

Ellimist

New Member
Jun 16, 2020
2
0
1
How many SSDs do you need? Doesn't seem like getting maximum sequential throughput is the main concern, so you could just use the integrated SATA ports.

at least 5 if I use storage spaces to get two drive fails in the "array" if you can call it that. Since I already use 8 drives I figure why the hell not go 8 again. Then any two can fail and all good.

I was curious, so did a test; I did not stop any activity on the drives.
Thanks. From what I can tell with SSD's storage spaces in mirror mode performs at a minimum as well as a raid card if not better in some instances.